"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
This is a non-human example of reciprocal altruism.
ReplyDeleteI see you're getting economism down!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Ryan, did you see I revised my estimate of Rowe's model after his comments here? I was misled by his descriptions of the model.
I am firmly against model blindness. I just don't see how this should change the priors of modern people who believe that nature is very violent, typically.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I have little to add with respect to the argument across the blogs in general, which is why for the most part I kept my head down...
"the priors" -- a few more years of education, Ryan, and you will achieve complete incomprehensibility to all but 100 other people!
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